Scent Art

Nose Encounters

This image is not my Daily Pic, which is why I’ve put it up: It merely points to the scent-art I want to talk about – that the perfumer Daniela Andrier is smelling in the photo – but which I have no way of representing. On today’s Daily Beast, I published a profile of Chandler Burr, the world’s first curator of olfactory art, soon to open a major perfume survey at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. And one of the interesting points that didn’t make the article’s final draft was that, unlike art forms like painting and photography or even music that can survive reproduction, olfactory media can only be experienced “live”, in the flesh. That means their serious appreciation absolutely demands the kind of dedicated space that only a museum can provide. Lucky such space now exists, at least for the duration of Burr’s shows.